The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [29]
“I’m interested in one of the things you’ve said,” I told him. “What sort of a celebration do you plan, exactly?”
“Something splendid, I think. Dinner, champagne.”
“And a bottle of mineral water for Kalash?”
Miernik got out his handkerchief again. I watched him go though his wiping ceremony, and when he had his glasses back on his nose I said, “Good night.” He gripped my forearm.
“You don’t want to do this,” he said. It was not a question.
“Miernik, you’re crazy. You want me to cross the frontier without a visa on an American passport into the most efficient police state in Central Europe. Then you want me to stroll into a coffeehouse where every waiter is no doubt in the pay of the secret police, flash a book of German poetry at a girl I’ve never seen in my life, and then escort her across a frontier that’s patrolled by soldiers and dogs, strung with trip wires, seeded with mines, and guarded by watchtowers that have searchlights and machine guns on them— all for a glass of champagne and a wiener schnitzel? I think you’re trying to get me locked up in a Czech jail for the rest of my life. I give you the short answer to your small request for assistance. No.”
“No—listen,” Miernik said. “If I thought for one moment that there was any real danger I would never ask you. But I have made arrangements. First, you will have a visa. That has been arranged. Second, no one in the coffeehouse is going to suspect a thing. You look like a German or an Austrian, which means you look like a Czech. You wear European clothes. You speak German with absolutely no accent; in five minutes of listening you will have the accent of the place perfectly.”
“The German accent of the place? There are no fucking Germans in Czechoslovakia—the regime threw them all out after the war.”
“Many people there still speak German. Anyway, you’re not supposed to be a Czech. Everyone will think you’re an Austrian or a German, a tourist or a businessman.”
“For Christ’s sake, Miernik. There are no tourists or businessmen in Bratislava. Czechoslovakia is Khrushchev’s country estate.”
“No, it will be all right. You will only be in public for an hour, at the very most.”
“I agree with that. I’m not likely to be in public again for the rest of my life.”
“Believe me, Paul, that will not happen. You will not have any trouble. Not with the visa, not with the coffeehouse, not with the frontier. The soldiers will not bother you, they will not turn on their searchlights, there are no mines the way you are going. I tell you arrangements have been made. What I am asking for, really, is an act of friendship that will take no more than a few hours.”
“I say it again. No.”
Miernik, in the course of this conversation, underwent a change. He stopped cringing. Now he looked at me with a perfectly steady gaze. “If I could do it myself, I would do it,” he said. “But I would spend the rest of my life in prison, and so would Zofia. I ask you because there is no one else I can ask. I trust you, my friend. You must trust me.
He handed me the book of Schiller. When I refused to take it he closed his hand over mine on the table and gave me a confident smile. “I warn you,” he said, “I will not give up. Tomorrow we’ll talk again. I know you will do this thing in the end. And we both know why.”
Miernik opened the book to a page with the corner turned down and put his finger on a line underscored in green ink. “Alle Menschen werden Brüder,”* it read. He patted my arm, cleared his throat as if to say something more, but decided not to speak. With one final squeeze of my biceps, he went upstairs. I heard him pause on the second landing to